Background
Chi Fang has also been known by the name Chi Cheng-ch’eng, he was born in Hai-men hsien, located in Kiangsu on the north bank of the Yangtze River estuary north of Shanghai.
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Chi Fang
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also known as
Chi Cheng-ch’eng
Chi Fang was an important independent guerrilla leader in Kiangsu who placed his forces under the command of the Communist New Fourth Army in 1940 and continued to serve in this area until the PRC was established in 1949. Chi’s most important contribution to the PRC has been his leadership of the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party.
Education
After graduating from the sixth class of the Paoting Military Academy (see under Yeh T’ing), he went to Canton in 1924 and by the following year was an instructor at the Whampoa Military Academy, the Republican Chinese equivalent of West Point, which was created and headed by Chiang Kai-shek.
Career
Chi participated in the Northern Expedition (1926-27), serving as head of the Organization Section of the General Political Department, which was headed by Teng Yen-ta, a man with whom Chi was to be associated over the next few years (see below). A supporter of the left-wing KMT Government (the “Wuhan Government”), Chi went to Shanghai in 1927 where he helped to found a number of political periodicals. More important, however, he participated in the founding of the China Revolutionary Party, which soon evolved into the Third Party (Ti-san tang). Led by Teng Yen-ta, the party stressed Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles and the interests of the peasants and laborers. In 1929-30 the Third Party was reorganized into the Provisional Action Committee of the KMT, although until 1949 it continued to be popularly known as the Third Party. Chi apparently did not take an active part in the work of the party after the early thirties, but in the late forties he was again to become deeply involved (see below).
In late 1933 and early 1934 Chi participated in the short-lived Fukien People’s Government, an administration established by dissident KMT leaders Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai, Chiang Kuang-nai, and Li Chi-shen and backed militarily by the 19th Route Army. Following the collapse of this government in January 1934, Chi returned to Shanghai where he was briefly imprisoned. After his release he again engaged in anti-KMT and anti-Chiang Kai-shek activities and was once again arrested and shortly after released. According to a semi-official handbook, Chi was sent by Li Chi-shen to the Kiangsu-Chekiang area to lead a “people’s movement” and to organize guerrilla forces following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937. He probably remained in the border area where some of the guerrillas from his “people’s movement” may have come in contact with the scattered bands of Communist guerrillas that operated along the provincial borders under the direction of Su Yu. When war broke out, Su’s guerrillas were incorporated into the Red military unit commanded by Chang Ting-ch’eng from the Communist soviet in southwest Fukien. Nothing further is known about the group with which Chi was working, but by 1940 he emerged as an active guerrilla organizer of the peasants in the Kiangsu peninsula north of Shanghai.
In late 1940 Chi merged his guerrilla force from the Fourth Administrative District of North Kiangsu with the Communists’ New Fourth Army. Prior to this, Chi had apparently been working clandestinely to organize the local peasants quite independently of the KMT inspector (or commissioner), who exercised authority over the Fourth District as the local representative of Nationalist General Han Te-ch’in, governor of Kiangsu. The Fourth Administrative District of Kiangsu was made up of the hsien of Nan-t’ung, Ch’i-tung, Hai-men (Chi’s native hsien), and Ju-kao, with its capital city in the small town of Chueh-chiang, a riverport town not far from the coast. A fertile and comparately rich area on the Kiangsu peninsula, the district was strategically located along the mouth of the Yangtze near Shanghai. Thus it was one of the first objectives of the Communists when their New Fourth Army troops, which had been initially concentrated south of the Yangtze, began to move north in 1940.
Politics
In taking over the Fourth Administrative District in Kiangsu the Communists retained much of the existing government structure, but they put a number of their own men into office. The area became a model of Communist wartime administration and a show place of collaboration between the CCP and the local peasantry. Full use was made of the development of mass associations (under Communist direction) to increase the participation of the inhabitants in resisting the Japanese. Here was a field in which Chi had had considerable experience. Whether he was or was not a covert Party member at the time, he could play a more useful political role in the guise of a non-Communist cooperating with the Communist-led resistance to the Japanese. When he joined forces with T’ao, an avowed Communist, Chi became the principal local district military commander, and T’ao was made the deputy commander of the local military force. At the same time the post of inspector of the Fourth District was given to a Communist named Chi Ch’iang-ch’eng. When this slate of local officials had been established, it was then given legal sanction by a congress of federated mass associations for the area, convened under the auspices of the political department of Chi’s Fourth District Guerrilla Command. The congress met on January 23, 1941, and approved the above slate of officials, at the same time declaring its support for the new Communist government of north Kiangsu. This government is extensively treated in Chalmers A. Johnson’s Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, from which the information on Chi Fang’s career at this time is drawn.
In brief, the Fourth Administrative District of Kiangsu or, as it was officially called, the Fourth District Administrative Inspectors’ Office (under Chi Ch’iang-ch’eng), belonged to the “Central Kiangsu Military Area” (Su-chung Chtin-ch’ii), located between Yen-ch’eng and the Yangtze in north Kiangsu. The Military Area, “the most highly developed Communist guerrilla base in central China,” was the headquarters of the New Fourth Army staff under Ch’en I (after January 1941) and the base of operations for the Army’s First Division (commanded by Su Yü). The structure of Communist and Communist-sponsored institutions in the Su-chung region included “Army, government, and mass organs” the most influential in terms of work with the local population being “the mass-movement sections of the political departments attached to the New Fourth Army units in the area.”
For the duration of the war, Chi’s Fourth District Guerrilla Command continued to be one of the Communists’ principal military strengths. The closeness with which Chi worked with Communist personnel at this time is illustrated by the official slate in the Fourth Administrative District where both his military deputy’s post and the position of inspector were held by Communists. But he also held an administrative post which tied him even more closely into the political machinery that functioned in the “Central Kiangsu Military Area,” over which the Communists’ First Division (under Su Yü) and Ch’en I’s military head-quarters had control. This military area contained two political units, one in the Kiangsu peninsula where (as described) Chi was top military man, and the other the area to the north of this centering around Yen-ch’eng where Ch’en’s headquarters were located. The latter area was administered by the North Kiangsu Provisional Administrative Committee under Kuan Wen-wei, a local Kiangsu CCP leader from Tan-yang, and on this Administrative Committee Chi served as the vice-chairman.
Membership
In the postwar period Chi remained in the Kiangsu area, serving the Communists as director of the North Kiangsu Administrative Office, and as vice-chairman of both the North Kiangsu People’s Government and the Kiangsu-Anhwei Border Region Government. It was also in the postwar years that the Third Party was resusci-tated, after which Chi became one of its most important members. At a meeting held in February 1947 in Shanghai the Third Party was renamed the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party (CPWDP), and Chi was elected to membership on the Central Executive Committee. He also participated in the establishment of the new national government, the formation of which began in June 1949 when the Communists set up a preparatory committee headed by Mao Tse-tung that was responsible for convening the CPPCC in September 1949. Chi was a member of the preparatory committee and also attended the September 1949 meetings as a representative of the “East China Liberated Areas.” Shortly after the central government was inaugurated on October 1, 1949, Chi was named as a vice-minister of Communications where he served until September 1954 under Minister Chang Po-chiin, then head of the CPWDP. The Ministry of Communications is responsible for river and highway transportation (but its jurisdiction includes neither railways nor telecommunications). Chi also served from 1949 to 1954 as a member of the Executive Board of the Sino- Soviet Friendship Association, then one of the more active of the mass organizations.
In December 1949 Chi became a member of the Central Committee of the China Democratic League (CDL), another of the non-Communist political parties. However, although he remains a CDL Central Committee member, his principal activities have continued to center around the CPWDP. When the CPWDP was structurally reorganized in December 1951, Chi emerged with enhanced stature within the party. He was re-elected to the Central Committee (the new name for the Central Executive Committee) and to the smaller and more powerful Central Executive Bureau (CEB). At this time he also became head of the Personnel Section and a deputy secretary-general. Chairman Chang Po- chiin continued as the dominant figure in the CPWDP until the 1957-58 “rectification” campaign, which resulted in the near total elimination of the CPWDP hierarchy. In fact, no other “democratic” party was so badly hit as the CPWDP by the purges that were formally implemented at its Seventh Congress in December 1958. For a year and a half prior to the congress, Chi had headed a special committee to direct an internal “rectification” campaign. He had, moreover, served as the party’s acting chairman from April 1958. Finally, at the congress itself, he delivered the keynote speech, the major portion of which was devoted to a denunciation of the alleged “rightist alliance” headed by CPWDP Chairman Chang Po-chiin. Predictably, Chi emerged from the congress as the chairman of the party, a position he still retains.
Relatively little has been heard of Chi’s activities since he assumed the leadership of the CPWDP in 1958. In large part, the scant attention paid to “democratic” party leaders since the 1957-58 “rectification” campaigns seems to reflect the CCP’s conviction that the non-Communist parties can no longer be usefully employed in the service of the state. Chi does, however, participate in various ceremonial tasks that require the presence of senior members of the non-Communist parties. He was, for example, a member of the presidium for a rally held in September 1959 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the PRC. He has also been fairly active in the affairs of the NPC. In addition to serving on the NPC Standing Committee since 1957, he has been a member of the presidium (steering committee) for each of the annual NPC sessions since 1960. Chi has also participated in the work of the CPPCC. As described above, he served on the CPPCC Preparatory Committee in 1949.
In 1954 he became a member of the CPPCC’s Second National Committee, and in 1959 and 1964 respectively, he was elected to the Third and Fourth National Committees. In each case he represented the CPWDP, and since 1959 he has also served on the CPPCC Standing Committee.
Personality
Chi’s career differs so greatly from that of most of the so-called “democratic” leaders that the suspicion arises that he may have been a covert Party member for some time even perhaps from the early days of his cooperation with the New Fourth Army. A typical course of activity for most of the “democratic” leaders is to have joined the CCP at the eleventh hour in 1949 after having spent most of the war years engaged in political in-fighting in Chungking and the postwar years in Shanghai or Nanking jockeying for political power as the Communist and Nationalist armies fought. In contrast, Chi has spent a considerable part of his life working with Communist-sponsored and leftist organizations, and during the Sino-Japanese War he saw active service with one of the major Communist armies.
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Nationality
China -
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party